Kerala kick-starts e-Waste collection & disposal from schools

Trivandrum: The State-wide disposal of e-Waste from schools in Kerala kick-started at Thiruvananthapuram with the Minister for Education, Prof. C Raveendranath flagging off the first vehicle with e-Waste from the Govt Girls Higher Secondary School, Cotton Hill.

Similar vehicles from Alappuzha, Puthukkad, Kozhikode North and Thaliparamaba constituencies where the Hi-Tech School programme was piloted, were also flagged off at the event, through video conferencing. A total of 12,500 kilograms of e-Waste were disposed of through this drive.

The e-Waste disposal from schools is a joint initiative by Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), formerly [email protected] project and Clean Kerala Company, and is aimed to dispose e-Waste from 10,000 odd schools and educational offices in Kerala. Schools are reportedly having over 1 Cr kgs of e-Waste accumulated since the past two decades, which eats-up huge space of IT labs, besides obstructing the lab activities in a large way. Instead of simply disposing of e-Waste as garbage which creates environmental issues, scientific methods are used to recycle and refurbish the e-Waste as per the norms set by Govt of India, a novel process which avoids spreading of hazardous materials like Mercury, Lead, Cadmium, Barium etc into the environment.

Clean Kerala Company collects the e-Waste in batches of 500 Kg from schools, for which neighbouring schools will be clustered. Equipments having a valid warranty or AMC are not listed under e-Waste. Also, the e-Waste has been properly excluded from the Stock registers maintained at schools and marked as ‘Unusable item- removed as e-Waste’.

The e-Waste collected by Clean Kerala Company will be scientifically processed at the recycling facility of Earth Sense Recycling company at Hyderabad. Equipments such as Desktop Computers, CRT Monitors, Laptops, Desktop Cabinets, Drives, Printers, Projectors, UPS, Camera, Speaker System, Television, Network Components, Generators etc are being included in the e-Waste category.